HN is special, and you all here in this comment tree are the best of the best -- love the fact that everyone is having fun with this in such a civil way and historically knowledgeable way.
For anyone who wants the naming backstory, InvestorsExchange.jl was originally IEXTools.jl, but Julia's package registration automatic name checks didn't like it ("Name does not meet all of the following: starts with an uppercase letter, ASCII alphanumerics only, not all letters are uppercase. Name is not at least five characters long") [1]. So to Wikipedia I went to find the non-acronym name of the IEX exchange, which is "Investors Exchange" [2]. Thank you all for helping me understand why IEX goes by IEX in all of their branding.
Not just the old internet! Ever considered visiting the Sierra Nevadas? Well there's a wonderful, outdoorsy place in California that's just waiting to welcome you: Lake Tahoe! Visit, uh, gotahoe.com, and keep in mind that the Nevada border, where certain things unrelated to outdoor sports are entirely legal, is right there.
Sort of? "Tahoe" isn't the problem. Sure, "hoe" is a substring of "tahoe" but it's pretty clear that "tahoe" is a placename in a string like "visitlaketahoe.com". IMO they absolutely knew what "gotahoe.com" would be parsed as, it's very clever. It'd be a Scunthorpe if the site was getting flagged for "hoe", but it's a parsing problem at the user layer, not censorship elsewhere.
My employer did some work early in Dotcom for a company that owned the domain name "manufacturersexchange", when I pointed out that was a terrible name for a business they said "no business person would notice that". Business never got off the ground.
I mean even with a dash it's really not a very good name for a business. What does the company even do?
Mind you, self-descriptive company names and domains are more useful for local small businesses; big ones like Google start to get their own meaning. ycombinator? What?
They wanted to start a manufacturing equipment business like eBay, but for factories, which itself was rather silly given how difficult shipping machines would be. They wanted a preliminary design for a 3 month period, but took 3 months to negotiate the contract, so in the end I worked without any input. I think they were completely clueless about the internet or how difficult such a business would be to run, or even market.
Looking at the FAQs they seem to know their business.
Q: Can I provide my own wood?
A: In most cases we can handle your wood. We do require all shipments to be clean, free of parasites and pass all standard customs inspections.
I remember one called penismighty.com. Which was a silly online community similar to, well nothing, but I guess the closest thing would be somethingaweful.com it even had alternative themes to the site which would lean into the different interpretations of it's name which was awesome.
> Welcome to Slütsof In Stagrâm an online fantasy series about a Princess duck named Slütsof and her adventurous journey across the mystical lands of Stâgram. Join her as she leaves her castle, searches for her long lost brother Brösof The Magical Goat and challenges a tyrant King who has claimed all of Stagrâm for himself. Here is some concept art to ignite your imagination! --New submissions below!
(The author of the site originally registered the domain for other reasons. Instagram tried to take legal action so they pivoted and back solved the purpose of the domain and why it wasn't infringing on the Instagram trademark)
Takes me back to the days of ExpertsExchange, the biggest predecessor to Stack Overflow. They were essentially forced to change their domain to Experts-Exchange.
For anyone who wants the naming backstory, InvestorsExchange.jl was originally IEXTools.jl, but Julia's package registration automatic name checks didn't like it ("Name does not meet all of the following: starts with an uppercase letter, ASCII alphanumerics only, not all letters are uppercase. Name is not at least five characters long") [1]. So to Wikipedia I went to find the non-acronym name of the IEX exchange, which is "Investors Exchange" [2]. Thank you all for helping me understand why IEX goes by IEX in all of their branding.
[1] https://github.com/JuliaRegistries/General/pull/27989
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEX